Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

Beauties: Kiki Smith

I am going to be waiting outside the Gap when it opens on the 15th, to make sure I get one of the limited edition t-shirts designed by the art world goddess Kiki Smith. The Gap, in partnership with the Whitney Museum, is producing shirts by thirteen artists, including such sirens as Smith, Marilyn Minter, Hanna Liden, Barbara Krueger and Sarah Sze, and such sirons (which I hereby declare to be the masculine form of siren) as Chuck Close and Jeff Koons.

Last year Target issued a limited edition of artist-designed bath towels and I happily snapped up one by Cindy Sherman. I am all for mass-produced art, and I'm glad to see this from the Gap, which has been struggling of late to find its mojo.

Pic of the t-shirt after the jump!

Beauties: Aliza Shvarts

I seem to be a lone dissenter in my respect for the now-infamous Aliza Shvarts' position as an artist, and admiration for the grand joke she's perpetrated on all of us. To me, she is indeed an artist, working in the fine tradition of Carolee Schneeman and Kiki Smith, women who use the female body as a a medium in often disturbing ways.

In case you haven't heard: the Yale grad student claims to have artificially inseminated herself repeatedly, then took abortion-inducing herbs to induce miscarriage and created an installation piece out of the detritus. The latest storm has the University hastily denying that any of this actually took place, with Shvarts countering that she did indeed do these things, even if the question of whether or not she actually achieved pregnancy during the making of the piece cannot be definitively answered (though it's likely she didn't).

There seems to be a rather large contingency dismissing Shvarts' thesis work by saying, "She did it to get attention." Which as a statement about an artist is neither here nor there: the garnering of attention is and ought to be the goal of any artist, with the exception perhaps of someone like Henry Darger. What they mean is that she did it only to get attention, not for "art's sake." Which reminds me oddly of passage in The World According to Garp, where Garp admits he wrote his first novel for the most noble of reasons: to impress a girl. It is not, I think, entirely valid to dismiss Shvarts because she made her art for the wrong reasons, or to say that it isn't art on that basis.

I'm meeting Todd Oldham on Monday

Anything you'd like me to ask the most likable man in fashion?

As I said in email to a few friends: All of my questions would be about the Top Design contestants, I think, so one of you is bound to have something more intelligent or funny to ask. "Think you can kick Isaac Mizrahi's ass?" is my stand-by question at this point; as ever, Target comes through with the goods!

I've only just started to think about what I'll wear. I think I might take a huge risk (for me) and put a flower in my hair - specifically, the twin to the one worn by my gorgeous friend Siobhan here. I've never worn such a thing, and I haven't really worn barrettes since I was three, but I do love the way they brighten up a look. Even if it looks dorky on me, that just might work in my favor with this lovely creature.

Shortbus & the warm, wet fuzzies

On the surface it probably seems unusual that a movie that opens with a young man attempting to fellate his own member and ends with an orgy should fall squarely into the tradition of romantic comedy.  But is it really so strange?  Why can't sex be charming, funny, sweet and sentimental, in addition to being rauncy, dangerous and dark?  In art, it almost never is.  Which is why I felt such a sighing sense of warm relief watching John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, which is every bit as explicit as Behind the Green Door, but falls more in the tradition of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot and Jennifer Aniston's latest vehicle. 

I've been thinking about sex and sexual imagery and art a lot lately anyway.  My son just started high school, which is the time when one begins to move beyond birds and bees and into exploring the actual culture of sexuality--and when I look around, by and large, I don't like what I see.  I cut my vaginal teeth on Jean Genet, Jane Bowles and other sinister stuff.  I think my initial expectations of sexuality were that it would be loving and recreational, but I was quickly disabused of any such notions by a culture that treats sex as relentlessly dirty, and oftentimes tragic. 

Both of which it is, or can be.  But it's also more than that.   Our strict ideas of what is "hardcore" has to do with hardness as in tumescence, but also hardness as in emotional impenetrability.  But sex is about penetration, permeability, fluidity, both physically and emotionally.  And I don't think we'll really ever be a healthy culture until our art reflects that.  Which is why I think Shortbus, in addition to being a lot of warm, fuzzy fun, is also important.

Manohla Dargis's New York Times review is spot on, even when she compares the movie to Oklahoma!

Hilary Duff, Salvador Dali & Me

I've never understood the public interest in celebrity hair.  These are people whose job it is to pretend to be other people, therefore, their hair never expresses much in the way of individuality, but is generally both tired and malleable.  The primary narcissistic cries of "look at me!  like me!" are usually accompanied with an attept to mimic a generic and accessible ideal that has been agreed upon by the reigning clique of stylists, editors, etc.  It's a stylistic environment that is far more high school than haute couture.  There simply aren't that many Kate Hepburns in Hollwyood, never have been.   

Celebrity fragrances are usually just as generic, trying to be all things to all people.    Beyonce, Britney Spears, JLo, Sarah Jessica Parker, Paris Hilton--all of them have forgettable, interchangable fragrances on the market, sweet, floral, innocuous things that smell like the old dimestore fragrances I remember from my childhood.I prefer my fragrances eccentric--I'd be more interested in scents by artists.  What kinds of potions would Charles Ray, Eric Fischl or Damien Hirst come up with?  What would Cindy Sherman's signature scent smell like?

So I was pleasantly surprised to try a sample of the atrociously named With Love... Hillary Duff, and find that... there's a there there.  A citrusy, showy beginning that reminds me of the grapefruit in YSL's Baby Doll (attrribtued in the literature to "mangosteen fruit"), on top of a woody, milky base.  There's a lot of vanilla on the dry down, but it still works for me.  I started to have sense-memory flashbacks wearing it, and after a bit of dresser-top forensics, figured out that it reminds me of an old favorite I haven't worn in a long time--aha, the signature fragrance by Salvador Dali.

Little Brown Dress

"A one woman show against fashion."

Kind of like hating the crime, not the criminal, I admire the effort here, if not the plaintive exhortation: "let's stop agreeing that the best way for women (in particular) to 'express themselves' is by purchasing new wardrobe items and putting together daily outfits."  Okay, so fashion may not be the "best" way to express oneself, but it's a damned good way....

Fashion isn't something men do to women, or that women do to themselves under some kind of pressure.  Most men I know are barely aware that fashion even exists, don't get it when they see it, and really don't care.  Fashion is largely something women do purely for their own pleasure.  So why need a "feminist" give up her pleasures?  If a woman doesn't enjoy fashion, then she should skip it, but telling all women that their enjoyment of fashion is politically incorrect is like telling all men that a love of sports makes them chauvinists.  These are category errors.

Micro Fashion Network

What would an abstract map of fashion look like?  Like this, according to MIT's Burak Arikan and Ben Dalton. "This project aims to explore the effects of           the fashion system by creating a micro fashion network with the basic       elements color and time.  A fixed camera and custom software           process and store the dominant colors of moving people in Cambridge's           busy neighborhoods. Similar colors connected to each other form a large           color network over time." 

I found this while noodling around looking at all the pretty pictures on Visual Complexity.

A fragrant worry stone

I was looking through the 2006 Industrial Design Excellence Award winners tonight and came across this wonderful polypropylene travel atomizer by one of my favorite designers, Karim Rashid, for Kenzo.  Unfortunately, it comes in all the Kenzo fragrances except the one I've been looking for, the overripe and overpowering Jungle.  (For being a girl of such trashy tastes, I've been to Las Vegas only once.  While there staying at the Aladdin, I visited the Sephora store in the lobby every few hours and drenched myself in Jungle.  I kept going back... and back, like some kind of addict. Whenever the heady, cardomom and rotting tuberose scent wore off, I started to feel strangely agitated.... People do that kind of thing in Vegas, I hear.  But oh, how I needed a Kenzo worry stone just then!)

Dirty minds think alike

Prince, I figure, is the love child of Greta Garbo, Brian Wilson and Rick James. It has to be a three-way, and you can argue with my gender ratios if you like, but not with the fact that he is reclusive, brilliant and nasty.

I've been listening to his new album (which you can stream for free), and heard an echo of the brilliant, autistic orgiast I fell for in in the early 80s, when I bought a cassette of Dirty Mind. On that record, Prince was like the Rain Man of sex: he played every instrument himself, and whipped himself into an onanistic epiphany on every song.

Some comic I can't remember now recently described sex as nothing but a necessary evil one had to endure in order to have something to masturbate to--and listening to Prince's new symphony, I get the impression that he, like Beavis and Butthead, will never actually "score." Which is why his representation of eroticism is so perfectly compelling. Because no matter what our level of sexual sophistication, we're all worried we'll never really "score."

That said, I just quit listening to the album at the third track, a smarmy, sentimental thing that made me wonder if he's got Debbie Gibson locked in his basement. Brother, let's stop that dove--dowwwwn with love!

Paris is Burning

I want to take a moment to talk about Paris.

In 1982 I was a starving student and sold my camera to pay for another night in a fleabag hotel where I had an attic room that had been painted with a floral-patterned roller to look like wallpaper. I remember riot police even then, hoisting Lexan shields against students who were taking to the streets over affirmative action.

The other Paris, the France of the Mind, is the place where my inner Coco Chanel, an unattractive little guttersnipe with a viciously stylish personality, made it to the top.  The real Coco lived a heartbreakingly stylish, unsatisfying and compelling life.  Her achievements were the result of brilliant decisions (clothing the exiled rich in beachy mufti) that weren’t any different from her poor decisions (sleeping with a Nazi).

Coco came out of it all smelling like No. 5.  Nazi-lover or not, she was fired by a conviction that taste was the ultimate morality, which France and the world eventually accepted, albeit mutely. It’s a conviction that still exists, and that I, in fits and starts, when I'm not paying attention, subscribe to. Every day I catch myself in a belief that fits my persona rather than my ethos. 

How many of your political views are dictated by your desire to match your mental shoes to your mental outfit?